posted August 16, 2006 12:39 AM              

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/060812/481/0c6b89be7a6b49cfaa3f0b8a7dff194f&g=eve nts/wl/080601mideast

By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 15, 6:47 PM ET

A civil defense worker who has drawn controversy for holding up the bodies of children killed in Lebanon said Tuesday he was lightly injured fighting a weekend fire sparked by an Israeli bomb.

Salam Daher, dubbed the Green Helmet for the color of his civil defense headgear, said he was hit by debris Sunday when a bomb or missile fell on a building while he was helping to battle a fire at a gas station in the port city of Tyre.

"I fell over when the bomb hit, and I got some scratches from debris that flew up on my face," he said.

The 20-year veteran civil defense worker said he shows dead children to photographers to make clear that Israeli airstrikes killed young Lebanese during the monthlong conflict. Some Internet bloggers have accused him of setting up photos and of treating the dead insensitively.

In one photograph, taken after an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the village of Qana, Daher held a dead infant over his head. The boy's blue pacifier was pinned to his nightshirt.

"I did hold the baby up, but I was saying 'look at who the Israelis are killing. They are children,'" Daher said. "These are not fighters. They have no guns. They are children, civilians they are killing.' "

He said he had no regrets and he made no apologies. "I wanted people to see who was dying. They said they were killing fighters. They killed children."

After the photograph taken at the July 30 Qana strike, which killed 29 people, Daher has found himself under attack, accused of being a propagandist for Hezbollah guerrillas.

One Web site posted video purporting to show Daher arranging to have the body of a child taken off an ambulance and displayed for photographers.

Daher has lived in Tyre since 1996, and was among rescue workers who helped the wounded and removed the dead after an Israeli missile slammed into a U.N. compound in 1996, killing 106 people. At that time, he was photographed holding a mutilated baby.

Daher, now 39, said he doesn't care what was said about him.

"I do my job, and I take many risks for my job, to help people. This is what I do," he said. "When I am rescuing people or taking dead bodies out I try not to think with my heart because then it is very hard for me. But sometimes it is too much, when I see many people or many children.

"I tell you there are many faces that will always be in my mind," Daher said.

posted August 16, 2006 04:41 PM            

His so called "rescue" assignment was supposedly Tyre...where there was no shortage of rescues to be effected...if you believe press reports...which fewer and fewer people do now.

Yet, we find this Hezbollah terrorist propaganda artist in Qana...doing exactly the same damned thing. Staging bodies for the main stream press photographers who have no clue if those bodies were even killed there or if they were even killed by the IDF.
These photographers arrive on the scene after the stage and all the props have been carefully orchestrated to produce the propaganda effect Hezbollah wants the world to see.

'Fauxtography': The media scandal continues
Posted: August 16, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Michelle Malkin

It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs calls it "fauxtography."

One of Hajj's photos was an iconic image of a dusty dead child with a clean blue pacifier clipped to his shirt, paraded by a corpse handler at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Qana, Lebanon. Mainstream journalists have sneered at bloggers' suspicions, first raised at EU Referendum, that some of the gruesome photos from that scene may have been staged. Washington Post photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez, who was at Qana, huffed: "Everyone was dead, many of them children. Nothing was set up." But last week, a German television station aired damning video footage from the scene showing a lead propaganda director (dubbed the "Green Helmet Guy") positioning a young boy's corpse, yanking it from an ambulance, placing it on two different stretchers for the cameras and pushing bystanders out of the way for clearer shots.

This Lebanese version of horror film director Wes Craven was identified by the Associated Press in a softball profile as "Salam Daher," who told the reporter, "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life." To clear-eyed readers, that's an inculpatory statement, not an exculpatory one. How many more "jobs" has Daher overseen? And how many more media stage managers like Daher are out there?

Not all photographers overseas have their heads in the sand. Last week, Middle East-based photographer Bryan Denton, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, revealed on the professional photography website Light Stalkers that he had observed routine staging of photos – and even corpse-digging – by Lebanese stringers:

"[I] have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in people[']s arms."

Denton noted that he had witnessed the photo choreography at numerous protests and evacuations, as well as at an Israeli airstrike location in Chiyeh, Lebanon. Denton followed up with a second post reporting that respected photographer friends of his in Lebanon informed him that "this was not an isolated incident" and that "this has been something [I]'ve noticed happening here, more than any other place [I]'ve worked previously."

Photo: Reuters

Which is probably why bloggers have noticed so many copious examples of phony-looking scenes – from countless pristine stuffed animals lying in the foreground of destroyed buildings, to artfully placed Qurans amid scenes of destruction, to a snow-white wedding dress on a mannequin standing in the middle of a street surrounded by piles of rubble, to intact cars photographed on Lebanese roadsides and dubiously labeled as being struck by Israeli missiles.

Miscaptioning (which always makes Israel look worse, never Hezbollah, go figure) adds another dimension of fauxto deception. One Associated Press image of an anguished father carrying his dead 5-year-old daughter into a Gaza City hospital last week blamed the death on an Israeli airstrike. Charles Johnson found a correction of the caption revealing that the girl had been killed in a swingset accident. I found a Reuters photo of an 18-month-old girl with two broken legs that was pulled by the wire service in late July after being included among a photo set of hospital patients injured in an Israeli air raid. In truth, the girl had been admitted for a "routine hospitalization."

Then there was the New York Times' misrepresentation of a half-naked young man sprawled Pieta-like, appearing dead, amid Tyre rubble. The original Times website photo caption? "The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble ..." Turned out the "dead" man was a "rescue worker" who was supposedly "injured" (with his baseball cap tucked neatly in his arm as he closed his eyes and flung his head back) and had been photographed in several other scenes running around the bombing site.

Isolated incidents? In a rare moment of candor, CNN's Anderson Cooper revealed the routine mechanics of Hezbollywood propaganda tours last week: "I was in Beirut, and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah-controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed ... they clearly want the story of civilian casualties out. That is their – what they're heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up. They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drivers. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them."

"Just making stuff up." Remember that.

posted August 16, 2006 05:06 PM              

Why are they going to so much trouble to make things look worse? Why wouldn't they be putting all their energy into just getting people to safety, or getting them the care they need? Do they really even care about the civillians, or are they merely "props" in Hezbollah's big opus premier war? Because that is what it's beginning to look like. I'm having some difficulty wrapping my brain around this. It's unfathomable!